Monday, February 8, 2010

I'm in it for the Ads

WHO DAT? The New Orleans win their first ever Superbowl and Katrina is officially over. Seriously though, congratulations on a fantastic win! With Mardi Gras just around the corner, I can only imagine what the topless girl-filled streets of the French Quarter looked like last night.

While I'll be the first non-football loving girl to admit that the game was actually quite entertaining this year, I'm usually in it for the ads. This year, however, I was quite disappointed. Not even Budweiser could come up with a funny commercial. The only decent one was the one that features the Clydesdale running along the adorable calf, turned raging bull three years later. What can I say, I have a soft spot for animals. The deserted island Bud Light commerical was okay, but I wonder if non-Lost fans recognized the parody. And way too long car.com and godaddy.com ads were stupid and had nothing to do with the product they were marketing.

I did, however, think that there were many entertaining movie trailers this year, especially and obviously this one. I'm also looking forward to seeing the new Robin Hood, as well as the M. Night Shyamalan flick. Some other winners include the Betty White Snickers ad, the Dorito-covered man in the gym ad, the stuffed animals coming to life KIA ad, and of course the long-awaited Google ad, which happen to be directed by a college friend of mine named Aaron Duffy. Congratulations, Aaron!

What I love about the Parisian Love Google ad is that it's simple, yet effective and heart-warming. It appeals to men for it's straight, dry humor and to women for its romantic side. It illustrates the development of a relationship through quick Google searches. I love the detail of the searches; how it corrects him when he misspells "Louvre" and how he goes off on a Trauffaut search tangent when he is looking up the meaning of truffles. This realistically depicts how someone conducts seemingly meaningless Google searches to come up with their end result, but also proves that these everyday web-surfing searches do have meaning, and in fact are very calculated. The subject of the ad goes from looking into study abroad programs in Paris, to searching for jobs in Paris, to looking up how to build a crib. And we get all of this with simplistic and familiar imagery that is the start to an excellent television campaign for Google.

If only the other many poorly executed commercials could have followed the path of Google and Dorito, then maybe the ad portion of the Superbowl would have been half as entertaining as watching 70+ year old musicians (aka The Who) belt out the lyrics to "Baba O'Reilly" - which many of you (including myself up until yesterday) know as "Teenage Wasteland."

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